


Convolution

by tortuosity



Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Breathplay, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/F, Gangs, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Judy Makes Bad Decisions, Love Triangles, Pining, Pre-Canon, Sex Work, Under-negotiated Kink, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-14 00:14:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29909217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tortuosity/pseuds/tortuosity
Summary: Everyone tells her Night City can't change. Judy, however, has never been a very good listener. She's determined to make a positive impact, no matter the cost. But in NC, the price of idealism is high indeed...- An exploration of Judy's life and relationships before the events of the game.
Relationships: Judy Alvarez/Evelyn Parker, Judy Alvarez/Maiko Maeda
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	1. Paralysis

**Author's Note:**

> **Convolution:** a mathematical operation on two functions that produces a third function expressing how the shape of one is modified by the other; the basis of digital signal and image processing.
> 
> We get so many tantalizing glimpses of Judy's past in the game: the bitter remnants of her relationship with Maiko, her growing disillusionment with the Mox, hints about her time at Clouds, whatever the hell happened between her and Evelyn... I knew I had to write about it. Something tells me this won't be a very happy fic (from me? Surprise surprise!), but I hope it's a satisfying one!
> 
> [Playlist here.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0SyuYBWpii7EucAQ7tSQ8Z?si=RToKKyIxQGChFw3-M3Corg)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After yet another disaster at Clouds gets swept under the rug, Judy gets an idea.

“You better be able to fix her. I’m not fuckin’ paying for another fuckin’ doll to get recycled this month,” Woodman said.

Judy ignored him, squinting at the text scrolling across her monitor until her eyes ached. The output wasn’t anything she didn’t already know, but reading it was probably a better choice than kicking her employer in the balls. 

Probably.

The screen was a mess of diagnostic error messages: “Somatic NS: 3%,” “WARNING: proprioception disabled,” “fatal exception 0028:C0011E36 in DollChip v.3.145b,” INITIATE_REMOVAL_SEQ failed!” They cast an eerie red glow on the motionless woman sprawled on the nearby table, a cable snaking out of the port in her neck and into Judy’s terminal.

“Christ,” he muttered from behind Judy’s chair. She could hear him pacing back and forth, bespoke leather boots thudding with each heavy step. “Who the hell is gonna want to part her out? She’s got last year’s faceplate and her tits are from before the Unification War—”

“She’s still conscious, asshole!” Judy snapped, whirling around to face him. “Look at the spikes on her auditory track!” She gestured to a screen on her left full of jittery waves, seismographs of the doll’s sensory neuron activity. Nothing south of her brainstem was firing, but she could still hear every one of Woodman’s disgusting opinions, guaranteed.

Woodman’s beady eyes flickered toward the monitor—not that he was bright enough to understand anything on it. “Good for her. And how many clients d’you think are gonna be interested in a doll that can hear but can’t fuckin’ _move?”_

“It’s a _client’s_ fault she’s like this in the first place!”

 _Clouds fulfills your deepest desires._ And that scumbag’s deepest desire, apparently, was to fuck a corpse, because Celeste went comatose as soon as the session started. But according to the error log, her doll-chip failed six minutes in, and Celeste got stuck halfway between online and off. Her mind was buried alive inside her own body. Awful enough for an “ordinary” session, but Judy had seen the security holo recording as part of the diagnostic process—it was… brutal, even by Clouds’s warped standards. When the client ended the session and Celeste didn’t respond, the prick just left her there on the bed. No one had any idea something had happened until the receptionist slotted the next client’s info into the net and Celeste didn’t jack in.

It was then that the bouncers had carted her off to the back rooms and into Judy’s cramped tech station, where she was meant to work miracles with nothing more than a few aux cables and a keyboard.

“Shouldn’t need to tell you that clients are allowed to do whatever the hell they like. The chip takes care of the rest. Which means,” he said, tapping Celeste on the forehead, “the problem is her piece of shit chip. And unless I’m misrememberin’, I’m pretty sure I hired you to handle those piece of shit chips, not run your fucking mouth.”

Judy white-knuckled her chair’s armrests to keep from ripping Woodman’s fingers off. “Fine,” she replied through gritted teeth. “Here’s the diagnosis: she needs a ripperdoc. Chip’s frozen solid; can’t override it. She’ll have to get it sliced out of her head, get a new socket installed, new doll-chip. And considering the chip flatlined during the session and didn’t wipe her memory… probably needs a fuckton of therapy, too.”

“You’re fucking kidding me. We can’t do this in-house? The fuck am I paying you for?”

“You’re _paying me_ to debug chip-soft and edit BDs. This was a _hardware failure_ ,” she said, slowly and with perfect enunciation, as if that’d help the logic penetrate his gonk skull. It wouldn’t, but the way his shiny bald head was growing redder with every word brought Judy some tiny amount of pleasure. “If the busted chip is salvageable, the doc can send it back and I can try and find where it glitched out, patch it for the next firmware update. But I’m not cuttin’ into her damn brain.”

“Ridiculous.” He looked close to pouting. Judy felt close to vomiting. “Better pray you get it back, then, because the next time this happens, doll’s gettin’ recycled and I’m hirin’ a new one.”

Judy caught a whiff of jasmine perfume, and Maiko soon followed, entering the room with the ghost of a savior’s smile on her lips. Judy’s grip on the chair relaxed slightly.

“I’ll take care of it, Mr. Forrest,” Maiko said with a blasé wave of her hand, like this was a minor inconvenience, like a client making a mess in the bathroom and not a woman suffering catastrophic trauma. “You know I can drive a hard bargain with the ripperdocs—we’ll get our money’s worth. Besides, I checked the accounts last night when I was doing payroll. Even with this little accident, Clouds will still be well in the black this month.”

“Great. You do that.” Defeated, Woodman stomped out, declaring, “I need a fuckin’ smoke.”

And they were alone, Judy and two dolls: one very much alive and pleased with herself, and one who had just come dangerously close to landing in some scav’s chopshop. Judy touched Celeste’s arm—between the bruises—and sighed.

“That man is stupidly easy to play,” Maiko said. She glanced around surreptitiously before taking a seat on Judy’s lap, the cheap office chair creaking in distress under their combined weights. “You might have better luck with him if you toned down the aggression.”

Judy found herself distracted by Maiko’s skirt—more specifically, the way it was riding up high enough to earn an indecent exposure citation anywhere that wasn’t a dollhouse. It looked expensive. Was it new? Hard to tell with Maiko; she seemed to have a whole new wardrobe every week. Necessity of the job, she always said, and Judy—whose primary clothing concern was a tie between “is it comfortable?” and “can I afford it?”—could only shrug. Shrug, and enjoy the view. It was a weakness, one Maiko eagerly exploited.

Seemed Woodman wasn’t the only one stupidly easy to play.

“Trust me,” Judy said, pretending to be oblivious to Maiko’s bare ass against her thighs, “I _was_ toning down the aggression. Only reason he left the room on his own two feet instead of a stretcher.”

“Now _that_ I’d pay to see.”

It was a hollow threat, and they both knew it. Judy had spent years digging eddies out from between her couch cushions as a freelance BD editor before she landed the Clouds gig. She hated the place, hated herself more for staying, but in the tug of war between satisfying her moral convictions and paying her rent, the latter was winning. And that meant not getting fired. Which meant turning a blind eye to travesties and biting her tongue bloody to keep from tearing Woodman, his Tyger Claw keepers, and the clients new assholes every goddamn shift.

Maiko noticed Judy’s dismay. “Don’t worry, Jude,” she assured gently, nodding at the table. “I’ll make sure she gets sent to Matsumi. She deserves the best.” Then she frowned, and her tone hardened. “And quit biting your nails. You know I hate that.”

Judy yanked her hand out of her mouth like she’d touched a live wire, a thin crescent of nail still hanging enticingly from the corner of her index finger. Hadn’t even realized she was doing it. “Sorry. Always feel like I gotta do something with my hands when I’m stressed, and I don’t smoke anymore, so…”

“I can think of a good way to occupy them.” Slinging one leg over the chair’s arm, Maiko wrapped her hands around Judy’s and placed them on her inner thighs, so far up Judy could brush the lace of Maiko’s thong with her thumbs if she so desired—and fuck, she _desired_. “Possibly several good ways,” Maiko murmured, breath hot against the skin at the edge of Judy’s sensory board implant. Her lips trailed over the rim of Judy’s ear and down her throat, across her hammering pulse, licking and biting and—

“Shit—Maiko, wait. Not here,” Judy hissed. Reluctantly, she freed her hands from Maiko’s grip and tried to resuscitate her short-circ’d brain.

The chair whined in protest as Maiko leaned away. “Aw, why not? I paid a little visit to security earlier. The cameras’ll be off for another fifteen minutes.”

Judy rolled her eyes and jabbed a finger toward their unconsenting voyeur laying serenely three feet away. Celeste’s visual input waves were flattened—she had closed her eyes when the chip glitched and seemed unable to open them—but her auditory cortex was fully functional, and somehow Judy doubted Celeste wanted to bear witness to a quasi-clandestine tryst in the tech room.

Maiko was less convinced. “I doubt she’ll care,” she said airily. “Everyone in Japantown knows we’re fucking.”

“ _I_ care,” Judy countered.

“You do, don’t you.” Maiko’s tone was indiscernible—it hovered somewhere between pity, mockery, and admiration. She rose from her seat on Judy’s lap and studied the walls of text on the monitors. “Not a common trait in this city.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Pretty sure my ability to care was excised my first week here. A blessing, really. Makes things easier.” For a moment, Maiko seemed to deflate. In the red glare of the screens, her designer clothes and flawless makeup lost their luster, and she looked smaller, younger, almost afraid.

Judy stared at her hands, at her mangled fingertips. Maiko—any of the dolls at Clouds, come to think of it—had never divulged any details about the less glamorous aspects of the job, but Judy had a functioning imagination. There were times she thought the memory-wipe function of the doll-chip was the most merciful bit of code ever designed.

“I… don’t think I could do that,” she said after a pause. Couldn’t do what Maiko did, couldn’t _not_ care, any more than she could choose to stop breathing.

“You could if people did this”—Maiko waved a hand over the blood crusted under Celeste’s nose and the thumb-shaped contusions on her neck—“to you.”

Before Judy could respond, the door opened, revealing a pair of beefed-up TC bouncers, and Maiko’s vulnerability instantly evaporated. “Take her to Matsumi,” she ordered them. “If she takes issue with the terms, she can call me.”

The men traded glances but did as they were told, securing the sheet Judy had thrown over Celeste’s body and wheeling her out the back door, toward the private elevator. The other clients would have no idea what had transpired in the halls of their pleasure palace earlier that evening. At Clouds, ignorance was bliss. And bliss converted directly to eddies.

With the cable now removed from Celeste’s interface port, the screens arranged around the desk went blank, leaving only the ceiling fixtures to illuminate the room with a cold, harsh fluorescence. Maiko didn’t appear in any hurry to get back to work. She leaned against the desk, arms crossed, fingers tapping to the muffled bass beat leaking in from the VIP lounge while Judy slouched in her chair and seethed.

“You’re angry,” Maiko said after several minutes of silence.

“What?”

The corner of her mouth turned up. “You always do that bouncy thing with your leg when you’re pissed off.”

Caught. Judy tucked the offending leg underneath herself and sighed. “Just—how the fuck do you not get pissed off, seein’ what happened to her? What happens to _you?”_ she pressed, and Maiko turned away. “We’re all just supposed to sit here and eat shit because Woodman and the TCs say so?”

Maiko shrugged. “They’re in charge, so… yes. We eat their shit, and then we smile and say, ‘Thank you.’ Sometimes,” she added, sarcasm clinging to every word, “they even give us money for it.”

“And if they weren’t in charge?”

“You wanna call in a hit?” Her brief burst of laughter was acidic enough to strip flesh from bones. “Some other assholes would just take their place. God, Judy—just move here yesterday?”

“No! That’s not what I mean. Couldn’t the dolls have some kind of… shit, I dunno, advocate?” Maiko’s look of skepticism only fueled Judy’s fervor. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, hands steepled together. “One of your own, you know? Someone with enough pull to get shit done. Make sure the right kinda people are gettin’ hired. Keep the workers from being mistreated.”

“Your first mistake,” Maiko said levelly, “is assuming a doll has _any_ kind of influence.”

“ _You_ do, don’t you? Hell, you practically do Woodman’s job for him.”

Maiko pulled a compact from her clutch and popped it open, inspecting her lipstick in its tiny round mirror. “I only do Woodman’s job because it keeps me out of the booth. The kind of thing you’re talking about goes way over his head. Your ‘advocate’ would need an in with Hiromi Sato, and he doesn’t notice dolls unless they’re extra special.”

“’Extra special,’ meaning…?”

“Getting requested by top clients. Repeatedly. Making him mountains of eddies, basically. I’m good, but…” The compact closed with a snap. “I’m not that good.”

Right. Maiko had only been working at Clouds for a little over a year; her beauty and talent meant little when everyone on the roster was beautiful and talented, and longterm clients already had their favorite dolls on lock. Those were the rules of the game. But rules, Judy thought, eying the interface cable, were meant to be broken.

“What if… what if I could make you that good?” she said.

Maiko’s brows raised fractionally. “I’m listening.”

“The doll-chip.” The idea had a grip on Judy now, and the words tumbled from her mouth in her ebullience. “I’ve been lookin’ at the code long enough; I know I could fix it up. Cut the bloat, make the algorithms more efficient, that sorta thing.”

“And what would that do?”

Judy could see it, those exact functions she’d scrolled by and mentally marked to change later in the free time she never quite managed to have. She ticked the points off on her fingers: “Increase the data throughput. Improve your reaction time. Know more of what the client wants, faster than any other doll.”

Maiko’s flash of enthusiasm was quickly derailed by a frown. “It’s not gonna fry my brain, is it?” she asked warily. “Rather not end up like Celeste.”

“Do I look like an amateur to you?” Judy scoffed, too excited to be truly offended.

“No. I know you’re brilliant,” Maiko replied, and Judy felt her face light up like the paper lanterns in Little China. Judging from her grin, Maiko didn’t miss the effect of her compliment—in a rare display of affection, she leaned down to kiss Judy on the cheek before commanding, “Alright, plug me in. We’re working overtime tonight.”

* * *

Judy barely tasted the wontons as she shoveled them into her mouth—perhaps a blessing, given she had no idea what the chefs at the Ginger Panda put in them. But she had worked on Maiko’s doll-chip well past her usual punch-out time and was starving. The process took longer than she anticipated. After debugging, each tweak needed to be tested in a virtual environment before she could feasibly implement it in Maiko’s chip-soft. And that was only the beginning: she then had to run the function in isolation, then within the context of the entire chip, offline _and_ on. When her concentration started flagging and she was forced to call it a night, it was no longer night at all; she had called Tom and Roxanne with the morning sun blinding her on the Megabuilding’s steps.

They were in their usual booth, the one in the corner Judy had carved “FUCK NC” into after a particularly rough night and one too many—well, more like five too many—drinks. It was becoming something of a ritual, coming here for breakfast after their shifts ended—a ritual Judy treasured. Making friends was never her strong suit, and doubly so at a place like Clouds, but for whatever reason, she’d clicked with Tom and Roxie as soon as they walked into her tech cave for a chip update.

“Want some of my eggrolls? You uh… look like you need ‘em more than I do,” Tom said, then pushed his plate over without waiting for Judy’s confirmation.

Tom was a good choom. He was part of the newest batch of dolls, and had latched onto Roxanne and Judy like an orphaned duckling. In turn, they—especially Rox—doted on him like mother hens. Not the sharpest bolt cutter in the toolbox, Tom, but his heart was in the right place, and unlike Maiko, his capacity to care was still somewhat intact. Judy had no doubt he’d support her doll advocate idea, if and when she decided to spill the deets.

“Thanks,” Judy said, transferring the rolls to her own plate with her chopsticks. “Was busy as fuck tonight; didn’t have time for breaks.”

“Celeste?” Roxanne asked, unable to stifle a cringe when Judy nodded. “I heard what happened. Straight bullshit, no other word for it.”

If anyone could call themselves a veteran of Clouds, it was Roxanne. She’d worked there longer than Judy, Maiko, and Tom combined, and had the cynical, world-weary attitude to prove it. She acted as a counterweight to Judy and Tom’s youthful flights of idealist fancy, keeping them from doing things that would almost certainly end in homicide—theirs, to be exact. Roxie was occasionally a killjoy, but Judy respected her too much to say so.

“Did you see her, Judy? How bad was it?” Tom asked.

“Bad. Asshole beat the shit out of her.” Thinking about it made her stomach turn, and she set the chopsticks down. “Worst part is, her chip fried partway through the sesh, so she was aware the whole time.”

Roxanne sipped her coffee, then asked, “She get stuck in paralysis?”

“Yeah. Couldn’t break her out of it without ripping the chip out. But, hold on—how’d you know?” No one else should’ve seen the holo recording.

“Her client was Ryuji Kitamura, right? All the girls know him. And we _all_ know what he’s into.” Judy hadn’t heard the name before, but Tom was nodding over the rim of his drink. “I got him a few times back in the day. Woke up sore, nothing too extreme. But Celeste told me he’s been getting more aggressive, and she’s the only one he’s matched with for months. Only a matter of time till something like this happened.”

“Can’t they ban him?” Tom mumbled around a mouthful of eggroll. “Like that guy who beat up Ruby?”

Roxanne shook her head. “Nuh-uh. _That_ guy was a nobody. Ryuji’s one of Jotaro Shobo’s chooms. I heard the two of them play poker at the Oh-Ho Club with Hiromi Sato, so…”

“So, big-shot TCs. And they’ve got Woodman’s balls in a vice,” Judy finished. She wanted to break something.

“Mhmm.”

“Fuck!” Sadly, nothing broke when she slammed her fist into the table, but the pain lancing up her knuckles and wrist felt productive, somehow. “It’s not right, Rox! How are you s’posed to do your job when you don’t know if the next client comin’ into the booth is gonna fuck you up?”

Roxanne shrugged, her nonchalance equal parts understandable and infuriating. “That’s always been a risk. You just gotta cross your fingers—”

“Yeah,” Tom chimed in, “like maybe you’ll get one of the boring ones who just wanna talk to somebody, y’know?”

“Jesus.” Judy massaged her aching hand. FUCK NC glared at her from over Roxanne’s shoulder; Judy’s impotent rage, gouged into wood. “You shouldn’t have to do that. Shit’s gotta change!”

“Shit _doesn’t_ change, Judy,” Roxanne said resolutely. “Not at Clouds. Not anywhere in Night City. Trust me, you’ll be much happier when you figure that out.”


	2. Coup d'État

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Maiko is promoted to unofficial manager of Clouds, Judy hopes it will bring them closer. But it only serves to drive another wedge between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains NSFW content. Additional tags have been added to reflect this.

Don’t dip your pen in company ink. Don’t jack into the boss’s subnet. Don’t shit where you eat. Judy used to believe all that, even harangued her coworkers for it. Getting romantically entangled with someone at work was a mistake. It was messy. It was the CHOOH2 to the workplace gossip machine. And let’s say you were gonk enough to do it anyway. What then? Decline promotions to avoid conflicts of interest and power differentials? Or break up and be forced to see your newly-minted ex every shift because there were no fucking jobs in Night City for either of you to run off and find a new one?

It was a terrible, stupid idea. Which meant, of course, that Judy threw herself into it wholeheartedly.

In her defense, she never _meant_ to fall for Maiko. Never even meant to have sex with her, but _that_ particular hurdle was vaulted not long after Judy started at Clouds, when Maiko caught Judy at a particularly lonely moment after she’d punched out for the night. Judy’d been busy drowning her sorrows in Broseph’s finest at one of the hole-in-the-wall bars tucked into H8’s base level when Maiko sauntered over and tapped her on the shoulder.

 _It’s Judy, right?_ said the lioness to the gazelle. _I’m Maiko._

What happened after that was blurry, fogged by alcohol and lust and a need for someone, anyone to just… touch her. Listen to her. Acknowledge her existence in the anonymous millions battling for air between Night City’s suffocating skyscrapers. And Maiko did just that—made Judy feel, if only for a night, like she _was_ somebody. They ended up in Judy’s apartment, clothes torn off and hands wandering as soon as the door shut. Didn’t even make it to the bed. Maiko fucked her on the floor under the blue glow of the aquarium’s lights, and it was so exquisite Judy forgot Maiko did it for a living. Until Maiko stood up, laughed, and said, _First time’s on the house._

But the second time was, too. So was the third. And at some point—maybe after the twentieth time Maiko neglected to charge her, it was hard to remember—Judy realized she was in love.

A curious thing, being in love with a doll. And not for the reason everyone assumed. Judy had dated sex workers before—BD stars, strippers, Jig-Jig Street joytoys. Their way of making a living was never why those relationships fizzled out. But the doll-chip in Maiko’s brain, tenderly embraced by her hippocampus… that complicated things. Like every doll, Maiko was two people. Or, to be more specific, she was one person and infinite people. Inside the booth, Maiko didn’t exist. Her mind, her personality, her life was obliterated and replaced with whatever the client desired the second she jacked in. She was a lover, a best friend, a wife. A vessel. And then the session would end, the fantasy would shatter apart, and Maiko would have no idea what she had just done.

Maybe that was why it was so hard for her to return Judy’s feelings—she couldn’t remember how.

For Judy, love was a torrent. It flooded her heart like the streets of Laguna Bend, sending her adrift, lost in its indomitable current. It was overwhelming, it was wonderful, and she couldn’t imagine fighting it. Maiko, though… if love was a river, she was a dam. An expert in building walls, sarcasm and callous irreverence her brick and mortar. The only way through was slow, relentless erosion.

When Maiko secured the promotion they’d both been dreaming of since that first night tweaking her doll-chip, Judy hoped it would be enough to crumble one of those walls.

“Look at this, Jude! My own fucking office!” Maiko spun around the center of the room, arms outstretched, like a child in a summer rain shower.

Her joy was infectious; Judy was grinning so hard her cheeks hurt. “Gonna need to decorate it. It’s lookin’ a little sparse right now,” she said, waving a hand at the blank walls and vast expanse of empty floor. The Tyger Claws had been kind enough to haul in a desk and a chair that looked like they’d been rescued from a Rancho Coronado backyard, but that was it.

Not that Maiko seemed to mind. “Don’t you worry. I have plenty of ideas.” She strolled around the room, pointing as she went. “I’m thinking a few couches over by the west wall, maybe some hanging scrolls behind the desk, a statue here… ooh, and plants!”

“Plants? Now you’re just talkin’ crazy,” Judy teased. Pulling Maiko close, she drank in the too-rare smile lighting up her face. She’d never seen her this happy before.

“Talkin’ crazy ten months ago is how we got here, isn’t it?”

“True. That, and a shitload of hard work.”

But that hard work had paid off. Judy’s theory about the doll-chip’s code was sound—even ensconced in her tech office, she heard all about the number—and net worth—of clients Maiko was pulling in after her soft was patched. Maiko’s name was on everyone’s lips: the low-level TC grunts keeping the no-names from sneaking into VIP; the other dolls, muttering it in dark, envious tones; that damn bartender downstairs who made eyes at Maiko every fucking time she saw her. And none of them knew it was Judy’s programming pushing Maiko’s performance in the booth to the bleeding edge. The secrecy was intentional. The private thrill Judy got every time she thought about it was… less intentional.

And Maiko knew it. “Damn right. Couldn’t have done it without you,” she said, and god, she’d never looked more beautiful than she did now, eyes sparkling, her entire being radiating pride. She kissed Judy fiercely, and then she said, so quietly Judy almost missed it: “I love you.”

Half a year since Judy had said it first. Half a year of getting nothing but uncomfortable silences and awkward smiles in return. She’d given up hope of ever hearing it, yet there it was, whispered like a secret between them.

Judy let her heart drown. “I love you, too,” she breathed, then shoved Maiko up against the desk.

The impact made Maiko gasp, though she was quick to smooth it over, pretend it didn’t happen. “Excited, are we?”

“Maybe.” Judy gripped Maiko by the jaw to kiss her, slipping her tongue past the waxy flavor of Maiko’s lipstick and into the taste of the top-shelf champagne Judy had klepped from the VIP bar earlier that evening.

They broke apart; Maiko chuckled wickedly and remarked, “Damn, woulda said it sooner if I’d known it’d do this to you.”

She sat on the desk’s synthwood top, letting her legs drift open with the barest pressure from Judy’s fingertips on the insides of her knees. Judy slotted into the space she made, her hands running haphazardly over Maiko’s body, over the sequins coating her skirt, the fake fur lining the collar of her jacket, the new gold cyberware streaking down her legs. All those gaudy status symbols Maiko hid behind—Judy wanted to rip them off, strip her down to something human, something only Judy could see, could have. She poured her frustration into each kiss, and Maiko took it, returned it, trapping Judy between her thighs and digging her nails into her back.

“Security hasn’t installed anything in here yet, you know,” Maiko said, a touch breathless. Like Judy didn’t already know. Like she even cared.

Judy deftly freed Maiko’s hair from its ponytail prison, threaded her fingers in it, and pulled. Maiko was still too calm, too composed; Judy needed her disheveled. “Said it yourself before: everyone knows,” she growled into Maiko’s neck between kisses with more than a little teeth. She had half a mind to leave a hickey or two.

“What, that you’re fucking their new boss?” Maiko fired back.

Fucking their new boss, in love with their new boss. Was there a difference? “That what you want, Your Highness?”

“How ‘bout you find out.”

Judy couldn’t see it with her face against Maiko’s neck, but she heard the smile in that challenge, sharp as monofilament. Fine; if that was the game she wanted to play, so be it. One hand on her chest got Maiko onto her elbows, the other bunched her skirt up around her hips. Judy tugged the jacket down around Maiko’s shoulders and pushed aside her flimsy excuse for a shirt, dragging her tongue over Maiko’s collarbone before descending to her breasts and enveloping a nipple in her mouth. That earned her a groan and a needy jerk of Maiko’s hips, then another when Judy rolled her other nipple roughly between her fingers.

Maiko arched her back, grinding against Judy’s waist, the heels of her stilettos digging into Judy’s ass. She wanted it. But Judy learned long ago: all the teasing in the world would never make Maiko Maeda beg. So, as always, Judy gave in first. She took a half-step back, giving herself enough space to get a hand between their bodies.

_“Fuck.”_

The state of Maiko’s panties left little to the imagination. Judy drew a finger along the sodden fabric, relishing the way Maiko couldn’t keep herself from shuddering as Judy pressed against her clit. It sent a rush of heat to the apex of Judy’s thighs, and she bit her lip. There was a unique pleasure in this—in knowing Maiko’s desire was real, not just some illusionary response created by the doll-chip. When they were done and Maiko was a quivering wreck… she’d remember it.

Maiko was apparently getting impatient. She knocked Judy’s hand away and yanked her underwear down around her knees, then brought their mouths together for another crushing kiss, muffling their moans when Judy slid two fingers deep inside her. The impatience was mutual—though the temptation to take things slow was a strong one, the urge to unravel Maiko was unstoppable. Judy curled her fingers, keeping a firm hold on Maiko’s hair with her free hand to prevent her from collapsing on the desk, and let Maiko’s whimper slide across her tongue, sweet as honey.

She was not gentle; Maiko had no appreciation for such things. Judy fucked her until Maiko’s legs trembled, until her haughtiness was wiped away and replaced with unabashed desperation. Their breathing intertwined, Judy’s ragged with exertion, Maiko’s increasingly shallow and staggered, signaling her impending climax. Judy kept her pace relentless and her eyes open. There was nothing better than watching Maiko fall apart.

Then Maiko grabbed Judy’s other hand and wrapped it around her throat.

Judy froze, automatically flexing her fingertips away from Maiko’s neck, but Maiko had her pinned by the wrist, and her grip was deceptively strong. “Do it,” she ordered.

There was no real reason to obey her—Maiko was close to the edge; a few more thrusts would finish her off. But there was a hunger in her half-lidded eyes, something wild simmering just beneath her polished surface, dying to be sated.

Slowly, Judy pulled her arm back, drawing the fingers inside Maiko most of the way out. For several seconds neither of them moved, caught in a heavy, ineffable tension. Until it became unbearable, and Judy tightened her hand around Maiko’s throat and plunged her fingers back in.

Maiko’s noise of surprise was immediately cut off. She continued to hold onto Judy’s wrist, though it felt less like a command and more like an appeal. Judy could feel all the delicate muscles in Maiko’s neck straining with the effort of keeping her upright. Her pulse, fighting past the pressure, throbbed against Judy’s fingers and thumb, so distracting she could barely maintain her rhythm with her other hand.

But fuck, the _power_. It aroused her, and it shamed her, and the shame only aroused her further. Maiko was utterly at her mercy, face reddening, gaze unfocusing, and Judy was so turned on it ached. She worked Maiko hard, adding a third finger, then a fourth, leaning in until their faces were so close Judy could’ve felt Maiko’s breath on her cheek, had she any left to give.

With Judy’s hand at her throat, it didn’t take much for Maiko to come. She convulsed in complete silence, the desk creaking threateningly as she bucked against Judy’s fingers. When she was finished, she wrenched Judy’s hand away from her neck and crumpled against Judy’s chest, her gasps for air sounding distressingly close to sobs.

Judy slipped her fingers free and held Maiko while she recovered. The post-coital haze began to fade, leaving her with the unpleasant sensation of satisfaction mingled with disgust. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

Maiko, however, seemed content; squirming out of Judy’s embrace, she settled back on her elbows, legs hanging off the edge of the desk, and smiled, looking every bit the cat that ate the canary in a city where both species were effectively extinct. “Well,” she said, then coughed minutely. “That’s _one_ way to celebrate.”

“Might wanna find a mirror before the TCs get here. You look like a hot mess,” Judy replied, feigning nonchalance. It wasn’t an exaggeration—Maiko had a burgundy smear of lipstick creeping up onto her cheek, her hair screamed “just-fucked,” and her underwear was dangling off her left foot. But she held herself like a queen, like she’d started her day fully intending to look this way by evening. And maybe she had.

“I’ll tell ‘em to get me a new desk, too. Doubt this one’ll take another round of… work.” Maiko hopped off the desk and Judy peered at it. Pretty sure it wasn’t leaning like that when they got there.

After adjusting her panties back to some semblance of normalcy—though “normalcy” when it came to undergarments had a rather loose definition inside a dollhouse—Maiko popped her clutch open and pulled out a cigarette and her lighter.

“You gonna take that outside?” Judy asked, already knowing the answer before Maiko placed the cig between her lips and lit it.

Tilting her head back, Maiko blew a lazy cloud of smoke toward the ceiling, eyes closed, like those shitty Biotechnica menthols were worth savoring. “It’s my office. I can smoke in it if I want.”

There was no point in arguing. Judy knew it, but unspoken words clawed at the back of her tongue, made her fingers twitch. She shoved her hands in her pockets to keep from gnawing her nails off. They weren’t going to talk about Maiko not giving a shit about Judy’s efforts to stay off the smokes, and they sure as fuck weren’t going to talk about the surprise choking. What else was there to say?

But Judy was never very good at staying quiet. “Talked to Roxanne the other day,” she said.

The cigarette hung in Maiko’s mouth a half-second too long before she took it out to respond. “Did you?”

“She’s got some good ideas on how to fix this place up. You should meet with her, see what she has to say.”

Maiko’s next exhale came out as a sigh, and smoke slithered across Judy’s face, tempting and repugnant.

“What?” Judy asked flatly.

“Can you give the doll revolution thing a rest for like… five minutes?”

“Why should I? It’s the whole reason we’re doin’ this.” Bristling, Judy gestured at the space around them. “The whole reason you have this stupid office, remember?”

“So, what—because _you_ think it’s stupid, I don’t deserve to enjoy it?” Maiko leaned on the defective desk, tapping ash directly onto its surface. “I busted my ass here for two years. I don’t expect you to know what that’s like, but could you at least let me have this?”

Judy crossed her arms, hands clenched into fists. “The fuck’s that supposed to mean? You think I didn’t bust my ass, too? That doll-chip in your head didn’t tweak itself.”

“You didn’t do what I had to do, Judy. You never have,” Maiko said quietly.

That stung. In all of Maiko’s considerable arsenal, she never stooped to weaponizing her job. She treated being a doll like she treated what she ate for breakfast, the day’s traffic, or the weather: not worth talking about. Mundane. Whenever she came home with bruises on her wrists or tears in her eyes, she deflected and belittled Judy’s concerns. Eventually, Judy learned to stop asking.

“That’s why you should _help_ those who have,” Judy argued, struggling to keep her temper in check. God, she wanted a fucking smoke.

“Jesus! I’m going to! But it takes _time_. You think I can just take a list of demands to the Claws? Do you have any idea what they’d do to me?”

“You wouldn’t even know what to put on it.”

Maiko’s eyes narrowed. “And you would, wouldn’t you?” she said, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees. “If hanging around dolls makes you an expert on what we need, I could call up any of my clients and ask their opinion.”

“Did you seriously just compare me to a fucking _client?”_ Judy spun away before she smacked the cigarette out of Maiko’s hand—or worse. She started pacing around Maiko’s ugly, empty office, if only to hide the angry flush burning its way up her face. This place, Maiko’s position… they were fruitless gestures from Sato with a thousand strings attached. A piece of scop for a well-behaved dog.

“I did no such thing, but you’re gonna believe whatever you want, like always.” From out of the corner of her eye, Judy saw Maiko stub the cigarette out on the desk. “Look,” Maiko said with a grandiose sigh, like she was about to make some huge concession, “I’ll talk to Rox, alright? I gotta talk to all the dolls, anyway. Woodman wants a performance review.”

“So you can decide which ones to fire?”

“Maybe. Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Maiko scoffed when Judy glared over her shoulder. “This is a business, not a charity. I’ll get their feedback during the review, then make a plan for what’s feasible.”

Right. _Feedback._ From what Tom and Roxie had told Judy, the other dolls trusted Maiko about as much as they trusted Woodman, which was approximately the same amount they trusted drivers of unmarked vans promising children free candy. They wouldn’t say a damn thing about the problems at Clouds when their jobs were on the line.

“Why do I have the feeling ‘what’s feasible’ is somewhere between jack and shit?” Judy asked.

“Because it is,” Maiko admitted. Judy heard the sharp click of heels on tile behind her, and it took everything in her not to flinch away out of sheer pettiness when Maiko put a hand on her shoulder. “I know you wanna do everything guns blazing all the time, but you need to be pragmatic.”

“Yeah, sure. And while we’re bein’ all pragmatic and patient and shit, more dolls get hurt. Or did you forget what happened to Mia last week?”

Mia was currently on unpaid leave, and would remain that way for an “indeterminate amount of time,” according to an internal notice. Ryuji Kitamura’s handiwork. A new faceplate was at the top of a very long list sent to her ripperdoc—not that she’d be able to afford any of it.

“Let me tell you something, Jude,” Maiko said, and if Judy didn’t know any better, she would’ve sworn there was a hint of sadness swimming through the ocean of condescension. “What happened to Mia has happened to whores all over this city since Richard Night built his first corpo-shack in the middle of the desert. And it’ll happen to thousands more in the future.”

“And that means you roll over and do nothing?”

“No, it _means_ I’m going to save my efforts for things that are realistic. It also means I’m going to celebrate my achievements. Preferably with the woman I care for, but if I have to do it on my own, so be it.” Maiko reached up to stroke Judy’s cheek, her hand a juxtaposition of warm skin and the cold cosmetic cyberware embedded in her palm.

Judy exhaled slowly, and all her fury hitched a ride on her breath’s current. “I just… I want you to remember why we started this.”

She looked at Maiko and tried to recall the excitement, the love surging through her only a few minutes ago, and came up empty. Who was that woman, spinning gleefully around the room? The woman who spent hours in Judy’s tech station patiently sitting through endless debugging sessions, talking about all the things she’d change if only she could? How could she be the same one watching Judy now, mouth drawn tight, eyes like emeralds, shiny and immaculate and completely unreachable?

“And I want you to trust me,” Maiko replied. “Be great if we could both get what we want.” She let her hand drop and turned away.

As Judy said her goodbyes and exited out the back door—at Maiko’s behest—before the Tyger Claws arrived, she wondered if that possibility was falling out of reach.


End file.
